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PAX VOBISCUM, 



AND 



THE GREATEST THING 
IN THE WORLD. 



BY 

HENRY DRUMMOND, LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.G.S., 

AUTHOR OF "NATURAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD," ETC. 



yci 24 1893 J ' 

NEW YORK: ^^JZ2L-~''&f yf 

THE POLLARD PUBLISHING COMPANY, 

13 Barclay Street. 

1891. 



- K- 







Copyright, 1891, 

BY 

POLLARD PUBLISHING COMPANY. 



Pax Vobiscum. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Few authors have gained world-famed celebrity so 
quickly as did Professor Henry Drummond. From the 
pastorate of an obscure mission station in the island of 
Malta, he soared gradually in moral intellectuality until, 
having returned to Glasgow and won the titles of Fellow 
of the Eoyal Society of Engineers and Fellow of the 
Geographical Society, he appeared in Northfield, Massa- 
chusetts, in 1887, at the invitation of Mr. Moody, and 
shone as a beacon in religious literature. 

Born at Stirling— the historic Stirling of the Scottish 
royalty— he was educated at the Edinburgh University. 
Having joined the ministry, his first evangelical labors 
were in far-off Malta. But, soon, his great Christian 
soul ached for wider fields, and, returning to Scotland, 
he was appointed lecturer at the Free Church College in 
Glasgow, and took charge of a workingmen's mission in 
that city. Here his philosophical teachings and deep 
thought attracted attention ; and in a little while Henry 
Drummond had sprung into the first rank of moralists 
and social philosophers. 

It was at Northfield, Massachusetts, that he delivered 



4 Introduction. 

the famous lecture, " The Greatest Thing in the World." 
Here, also, did he earn fame by other wonderful utter- 
ances. 

Divines from every state in the union were present; 
men whose eloquence had stirred communities almost to 
frenzy -point. But Drummond talked, not with peculiar 
eloquence, but with a sense of decision in religious 
thought which was accepted in positive awe by those 
who had erstwhile posed as mentors in the science of 
religion. His arguments were positive. His writings 
expose his thoughts. 

His work, " Natural Law in the Spiritual World," has 
had a sale in England and America of nearly one 
million copies. As an African traveller he has added 
a charming gem to travel-literature in " Tropical 
Africa." And, later, his brochure, u Pax Vobiscum," 
sparkles with fervid religious truths and literary ex- 
cellence. 

Recently he has travelled with Professor Geike in the 
Rocky Mountains ; and it is more than probable that ere 
long the reading public will be favored with a work from 
his pen descriptive of that grand panorama of nature. 



PAX VOBISCUM. 



" Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; 
for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto 
your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." 

6 



PAX YOBISCUM. 



I heard this morning a sermon by a distinguished 
preacher upon u Best." It was full of beautiful thoughts; 
but when I came to ask myself, " How does he say I can 
get Rest ?" there was no answer. The sermon was sin- 
cerely meant to be practical, yet it contained no experi- 
ence that seemed to me to be tangible, nor any advice 
that I could grasp— any advice, that is to say, which 
could help me to find the thing itself as I went about 
the world this afternoon. 

Yet this omission of what is, after all, the only impor- 
tant problem, was not the fault of the preacher. The 
whole popular religion is in the twilight here. And 
when pressed for really working specifics for the ex- 
periences with which it deals, it falters, and seems to 
lose itself in mist. 

The want of connection between the great words of 
religion and every-day life has bewildered and discour- 
aged all ok us. Christianity possesses the noblest words 

in the language; its literature overflows with terms ex- 

7 



8 Pax Vobiscum. 

pressive of the greatest and happiest moods which can 
fill the soul of man. Best, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, 
Light— these words occur with such persistency in 
hymns and prayers that an observer might think they 
formed the staple of Christian experience. But on com- 
ing to close quarters with the actual life of most of us, 
how surely would he be disenchanted ! I do not think 
we ourselves are aware how much our religious life is 
made up of phrases; how much of what we call Chris- 
tian Experience is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere 
religious phraseology with almost nothing behind it in 
what we really feel and know. 

To some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences seem 
further away than when we took the first steps in the 
Christian life. That life has not opened out as we had 
hoped ; we do not regret our religion, but we are dis- 
appointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when 
wandering notes from a diviner music stray into our 
spirits; but these experiences come at few and fitful 
moments. We have no sense of possession in them. 
When they visit us, it is a surprise. When they leave 
us, it is without explanation. When we wish their re- 
turn, we do not know how to secure it. 

All which means a religion without solid base, and a 
poor and flickering life. It means a great bankruptcy in 
those experiences which give Christianity its personal 
solace and make it attractive to the world, and a great 
uncertainty as to any remedy. It is as if we knew 
everything about health— except the way to get it. 

I am quite sure that the difficulty does not lie in the 
fact that men are not in earnest. This is simply not the 



Pax Vobiscam. Q 

fact. All around us Christians are wearing themselves 
out in trying to be better. The amount of spiritual 
longing in the world— in the hearts of unnumbered thou- 
sands of men and women in whom we should never sus- 
pect it; among the wise and thoughtful; among the 
young and gay, who seldom assuage and never betray 
their thirst— this is one of the most wonderful and 
touching facts of life. It is not more heat that is needed, 
but more light ; not more force, but a wiser direction to 
be given to very real energies already there. 

The usual advice when one asks for counsel on these 
questions is, "Pray." But this advice is far from ade- 
quate. I shall qualify the statement presently ; but let 
me urge it here, with what you will perhaps call daring 
emphasis, that to pray for these things is not the way to 
get them. No one will get them without praying; but 
that men do not get them by praying is the simple fact. 
We have all prayed, and sincerely prayed, for such ex- 
periences as I have named ; prayed, believing that that 
was the way to get them. And yet have we got them ? 
The test is experience. I dare not limit prayer; still less 
the grace of God. If you have got them in this way, it 
is well. I am speaking to those, be they few or many, 
who have not got them; to ordinary men in ordinary 
circumstances. But if we have not got them, it by no 
means follows that prayer is useless. The correct con- 
clusion is only that it is useless, or inadequate rather, 
for this particular purpose. To make prayer the sole re- 
sort, the universal panacea for every spiritual ill, is as 
radical a mistake as to prescribe only one medicine for 
every bodily trouble. The physician who does the last 



10 Pax Vobiscum 

is a quack; the spiritual adviser who does the first is 
grossly ignorant of his profession. 

To do nothing but pray is a wrong done to prayer itself, 
and can only end in disaster. It is as if one tried to live 
only with the lungs, as if one assimilated only air and 
neglected solid food. The lungs are a first essential, the 
air is a first essential; but the body has many members, 
given for different purposes, secreting different things, 
and each has a method of nutrition as special to itself as 
its own activity. While prayer, then, is the character- 
istic sublimity of the Christian life, it is by no means the 
only one. And those who make it the sole alternative, 
and apply it to purposes for which it was never meant, 
are really doing the greatest harm to prayer itself. To 
couple the word " inadequate " with this mighty word is 
not to dethrone prayer, but to exalt it. What dethrones 
prayer is unanswered prayer. When men pray for 
things which do not come that way — pray with sincere 
belief that prayer, unaided and alone, will compass what 
they ask— then, not getting what they ask, they often 
give up prayer. This is the natural history of much 
atheism, not only an atheism of atheists, but a more 
terrible atheism of Christians, an unconscious atheism, 
whose roots have struck far into many souls whose last 
breath would be spent in denying it. So, I repeat, it is a 
mistaken Christianity which allows men to cherish a 
blind belief in the omnipotence of prayer. Prayer, cer- 
tainly, when the appropriate conditions are fulfilled, is 
omnipotent, but not blind prayer. Blind prayer is a 
superstition. Prayer, in its true sense, contains the sane 
recognition that while man prays in faith, God acts by 



Pax Vobiscum. II 

law. What that means in the immediate connection we 
shall see presently. 

What, then, is the remedy ? It is impossible to doubt 
that there is a remedy, and it is equally impossible to be- 
lieve that it is a secret. The idea that some few men, by 
happy chance or happier temperament, have been given 
the secret— as if there were some sort of knack or trick 
of it — is wholly incredible and wrong. Religion must be 
for all ; and the way into its loftiest heights must be by 
a gateway through which the peoples of the world may 
pass. 

I shall have to lead up to this gateway by a very fa- 
miliar path. But as this path is strangely unfrequented 
where it passes into the religious sphere, I must ask your 
forbearance for dwelling for a moment upon the com- 
monest of commonplaces. 

EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 

Nothing that happens in the world happens by chance. 
God is a God of order. Everything is arranged upon 
definite principles, and never at random. The world, 
even the religious world, is governed by law. Charac- 
ter is governed by law. Happiness is governed by law. 
The Christian experiences are governed by law. Men, 
forgetting this, expect Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith to drop 
into their souls from the air like snow or rain. But in 
point of fact they do not do so ; and if they did they 
would no less have their origin in previous activities and 
be controlled by natural laws. Rain and snow do drop 
from the air, but not without a long previous history. 



12 Pax Vobiscum. 

They are the mature effects of former causes. Equally 
so are Eest and Peace and Joy. They, too, have each 
a previous history. Storms and winds and calms are 
not accidents, but brought about by antecedent cir- 
cumstances. Eest and Peace are but calms in man's in- 
ward nature, and arise through causes as definite and as 
inevitable. 

Eealize it thoroughly : it is a methodical not an acci- 
dental world. If a housewife turns out a good cake, it 
is the result of a sound receipt, carefully applied. She 
cannot mix the assigned ingredients and fire them for 
the appropriate time without producing the result. It is 
not she who has made the cake ; it is nature. She brings 
related things together; sets causes at work; these causes 
bring about the result. She is not a creator, but an in- 
termediary. She does not expect random causes to pro- 
duce specific effects— random ingredients would only 
produce random cakes. So it is in the making of Chris- 
tian experiences. Certain lines are followed; certain 
effects are the result. These effects cannot but be the 
result. But the result can never take place without 
the previous cause. To expect results without ante- 
cedents is to expect cakes without ingredients. That 
impossibility is precisely the almost universal expec- 
tation. 

Now what I mainly wish to do is to help you firmly to 
grasp this simple principle of Cause and Effect in the 
spiritual world. And instead of applying the principle 
generally to each of the Christian experiences in turn, I 
shall examine its application to one in some little detail. 
The one I shall select is Eest. And I think any one who 



Pax Vobiscum. 1 3 

follows the application in this single instance will be 
able to apply it for himself to all the others. 

Take such a sentence as this: African explorers are 
subject to fevers which cause restlessness and delirium. 
Note the expression, " cause restlessness." Restless- 
ness has a cause. Clearly, then, any one who wished to 
get rid of restlessness would proceed at once to deal with 
the cause. If that were not removed, a doctor might 
prescribe a hundred things, and all might be taken in 
turn, without producing the least effect. Things are so 
arranged in the original planning of the world that cer- 
tain effects must follow certain causes, and certain 
causes must be abolished before certain effects can be 
removed. Certain parts of Africa are inseparably linked 
with the physical experience called fever; this fever is 
in turn infallibly linked with a mental experience called 
restlessness and delirium. To abolish the mental experi- 
ence the radical method would be to abolish the physical 
experience, and the way of abolishing the physical ex- 
perience would be to abolish Africa, or to cease to go 
there. Now this holds good for all other forms of Rest- 
lessness. Every other form and kind of Restlessness in 
the world has a definite cause, and the particular kind 
of Restlessness can only be removed by removing the 
allotted cause. 

All this is also true of Rest. Restlessness has a cause: 
must not Rest have a cause ? Necessarily. If it were a 
chance world we would not expect this; but, being a 
methodical world, it cannot be otherwise. Rest, physi- 
cal rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every kind of rest 
has a cause, as certainly as restlessness. Now causes 



14 Pax Vobiscnm. 

are discriminating. There is one kind of cause for every 
particular effect, and no other; and if one particular 
elf act is desired, the corresponding cause must be set in 
motion. It is no use proposing finely devised schemes, 
or going through general pious exercises in the hope that 
somehow Eest will come. The Christian life is not 
casual, but causal. All nature is a standing protest 
against the absurdity of expecting to secure spiritual 
effects, or any effects, without the employment of ap- 
propriate causes. The Great Teacher dealt what ought 
to have been the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by 
a single question, k ' Do men gather grapes of thorns, or 
figs of thistles ?" 

Why, then, did the Great Teacher not educate His fol- 
lowers fully ? Why did He not tell us, for example, how 
such a thing as Eest might be obtained ? The answer is, 
that He did. But plainly, explicitly, in so many words ? 
Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many words. He assigned 
Eest to its cause, in words with which each of us has 
been familiar from his earliest childhood. 

He begins, you remember — for you at once know the 
passage I refer to— almost as if Eest could be had with- 
out any cause: "Come unto me," He says, "and I will 
give you Eest." 

Eest, apparently, was a favor to be bestowed ; men had 
but to come to Him ; He would give it to every appli- 
cant. But the next sentence takes that all back. The 
qualification, indeed, is added instantaneously. For 
what the first sentence seemed to give was next thing to 
an impossibility. For how, in a literal sense, can Eest 
be given f One could no more give away Eest than he 



Pax Vobiscum. 1 5 

could give away Laughter. We speak of " causing" 
laughter, which we can do ; but we cannot give it away. 
When we speak of giving pain, we know perfectly well 
we cannot give pain away. And when we aim at giving 
pleasure, all that we do is to arrange a Set of circum- 
stances in such a way as that these shall cause pleasure. 
Of course there is a sense, and a very wonderful sense, 
in which a Great Personality breathes upon all who 
come within its influence an abiding peace and trust. 
Men can be to other men as the shadow of a great rock 
in a weary land: much more Christ; much more Christ 
as Perfect Man ; much more still as Saviour of the world. 
But it is not this of which I speak. When Christ said 
He would give men Best, He meant simply that He 
would put them in the way of it. By no act of convey- 
ance would, or could, He make over His own Eest to 
them. He could give them His receipt for it. That was 
all. But He would not make it for them. For one 
thing, it was not in His plan to make it for them; for 
another thing, men were not so planned that it could be 
made for them; and for yet another thing, it was a 
thousand times better that they should make it for them- 
selves. 

That this is the meaning becomes obvious from the 
wording of the second sentence: " Learn of me and ye 
shall find Eest." Eest, that is to say, is not a thing that 
can be given, but a thing to be acquired. It comes not 
by an act, but by a process. It is not to be found in a 
happy hour, as one finds a treasure ; but slowly, as one 
finds knowledge. It could indeed be no more found in a 
moment than could knowledge. A soil has to be pre- 



1 6 Pax Vobiscum. 

pared for it. Like a fine fruit, it will grow in one 
climate and not in another ; at one altitude and not at 
another. Like all growths it will have an orderly de- 
velopment and mature by slow degrees. 

The nature of this slow process Christ clearly defines 
when He says we are to achieve Eest by learning. 
" Learn of me,' 1 He says, " and ye shall find rest to your 
souls." Now consider the extraordinary originality of 
this utterance. How novel the connection between these 
two words, " Learn " and "Rest " ? How few of us have 
ever associated them — ever thought that Rest was a 
thing to be learned; ever laid ourselves out for it as 
we would to learn a language; ever practised it as we 
would practise the violin ? Does it not show how en- 
tirely new Christ's teaching still is to the world, that 
so old and threadbare an aphorism should still be so 
little known ? The last thing most of us would have 
thought of would have been to associate Best with Work. 

What must one work at ? What is that which if duly 
learned will find the soul of man in Rest ? Christ 
answers without the least hesitation. He specifies two 
things— Meekness and Lowliness. "Learn of me," He 
says, "fori am meek and lowly in heart." Now these 
two things are not chosen at random. To these accom- 
plishments, in a special way, Rest is attached. Learn 
these, in short, and you have already found Rest. These 
as they stand are direct causes of Rest ; will produce it at 
once; cannot but produce it at once. And if you think 
for a single moment, you will see how this is necessarily 
so, for causes are never arbitrary, and the connection be- 



Pax Vobiscum. l? 

tween antecedent and consequent here and everywhere 
lies deep in the nature of things. 

What is the connection, then? I answer by a further 
question. What are the chief causes of Unrest f If you 
know yourself, you will answer, Pride, Selfishness, Am- 
bition. As you look back upon the past years of your 
life, is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come 
from the succession of personal mortifications and 
almost trivial disappointments which the intercourse of 
life has brought you? Great trials come at lengthened 
intervals, and we rise to breast them ; but it is the petty 
friction of our e very-day life with one another, the jar of 
business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, 
the collar se of our ambition, the crossing of our will or 
the taking down of our conceit, which make inward 
peace impossible. Wounded vanity, then, disappointed 
hopes, unsatisfied selfishness— these are the old, vulgar, 
universal sources of man's unrest. Now it is obvious 
why Christ pointed out as the two chief objects for 
attainment the exact opposites of these. To meekness 
and lowliness these things simply do not exist. They 
cure unrest by making it impossible. These remedies do 
not trif*e with surface symptoms; they strike at once at 
removing causes. The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centred 
life can be removed at once by learning meekness and 
lowliness of heart. He who learns them is forever proof 
against it. He lives henceforth a charmed life. Chris- 
tianity is a fine inoculation, a transfusion of healthy 
blood into an anaemic or poisoned soul. No fever can 
attack a perfectly sound body; no fever of unrest can 
disturb a soul which has breathed the air or learned the 



1 8 Pax Vobiscum. 

ways of Christ. Men sigh for the wings of a dove that 
they may fly away and be at Rest. But flying away 
will not help us. " The Kingdom of God is within you." 
We aspire to the top to look for Best; it lies at the 
bottom. Water rests only when it gets to the lowest 
place. So do men. Hence be lowly. The man who has 
no opinion of himself at all can never be hurt if others 
do not acknowledge him. Hence, be meek. He who is 
without expectation cannot fret if nothing comes to him. 
It is self-evident that these things are so. The lowly 
man and the meek man are really above all other men, 
above all other things. They dominate the world because 
they do not care for it. The miser does not possess gold, 
gold possesses him. But the meek possess it. "The 
meek," said Christ, "inherit the earth." They do not 
buy it ; they do not conquer it ; but they inherit it. 

There are people who go about the world looking out 
for slights, and they are necessarily miserable, for they 
find them at every turn — especially the imaginary ones. 
One has the same pity for such men as for the very poor. 
They are the morally illiterate. They have had no real 
education, for they have never learned how to live. Few 
men know how to live. We grow up at random, carrying 
into mature life the merely animal methods and motives 
which we had as little children. And it does not occur 
to us that all this must be changed ; that much of it must 
be reversed; that life is the finest of the Fine Arts; that 
it has to be learned with lifelong patience, and that the 
years of our pilgrimage are all too short to master it 
triumphantly. 

Yet this is what Christianity is for-— to teach men the 



Pax Vobiscum. 19 

Art of Life. And its whole curriculum lies in one word 
— " Learn of me." Unlike most education, this is almost 
purely personal; it is not to be had from books or 
lectures or creeds or doctrines. It is a study from the 
life. Christ never said much in mere words about the 
Christian graces. He lived them, He was them. Yet 
we do not merely copy Him. We learn His art by 
living with Him, like the old apprentices with their 
masters. 

Now we understand it all ? Christ's invitation to the 
weary and heavy-laden is a call to begin life over again 
upon a new principle— upon His own principle. " Watch 
my way of doing things," He says. " Follow me. Take 
life as I take it. Be meek and lowly and you will find 
Rest." 

I do not say, remember, that the Christian life to 
every man, or to any man, can be a bed of roses. No 
educational process can be this. And perhaps if some 
men knew how much was involved in the simple 
" learn " of Christ, they would not enter His school with 
so irresponsible a heart. For there is not only much to 
learn, but much to unlearn. Many men never go to this 
school at all till their disposition is already half ruined 
and character has taken on its fatal set. To learn 
arithmetic is difficult at fifty — much more to learn 
Christianity. To learn simply what it is to be meek and 
lowly, in the case of one who has had no lessons in that 
in childhood, may cost him half of what he values most 
on earth. Do we realize, for instance, that the way of 
teaching humility is generally by humiliation^ There is 
probably no other school for it. When a man enters 



20 Pax Vobiscum. 

himself as a pupil in such a school it means a very great 
thing. There is much Rest there, but there is also much 
Work. 

I should be wrong, even though my theme is the 
brighter side, to ignore the cross and minimize the cost. 
Only it gives to the cross a more definite meaning, and a 
rarer value, to connect it thus directly and causally with 
the growth of the inner life. Our platitudes on the 
" benefits of affliction" are usually about as vague as 
our theories of Christian Experience. " Somehow," we 
believe affliction does us good. But it is not a question 
of " Somehow." The result is definite, calculable, neces- 
sary. It is under the strictest law of cause and effect. 
The first effect of losing one's fortune, for instance, is 
humiliation; and the effect of humiliation, as we have 
just seen, is to make one humble; and the effect of being 
humble is to produce Rest. It is a roundabout way, 
apparently, of producing Rest; but Nature generally 
works by circular processes; and it is not certain that 
there is any other way of becoming humble, or of find- 
ing Rest. If a man could make himself humble to order, 
it might simplify matters, but we do not find that this 
happens. Hence we must all go through the mill. Hence 
death, death to the lower self, is the nearest gate and the 
quickest road to life. 

Yet this is only half the truth. Christ's life outwardly 
was one of the most troubled lives that was ever lived: 
tempest and tumult, tumult and tempest, the waves 
breaking over it all the time till the worn body was laid 
in the grave. But the inner life was a sea of glass. The 
great calm was always there. At any moment jo\x 



Pax Vobiscum. 21 

might have gone to Him and found Eest. And even 
when the bloodhounds were dogging Him in the streets 
of Jerusalem, He turned to His disciples and offered 
them, as a last legacy, " My peace." Nothing even for a 
moment broke the serenity of Christ's life on earth. 
Misfortune could not reach Him; He had no fortune. 
Food, raiment, money — fountain-heads of half the world's 
weariness — He simply did not care for; they played no 
part in His life ; He k ' took no thought " for them . It was 
impossible to affect Him by lowering His reputation ; He 
had already made Himself of no reputation. He was 
dumb before insult. When He was reviled, He reviled 
not again. In fact, there was nothing that the world 
could do to Him that could ruffle the surface of His spirit. 

Such living, as mere living, is altogether unique. It is 
only when we see what it was in Him that we can know 
what the word Eest means. It lies not in emotions, nor 
in the absence of emotions. It is not a hallowed feeling 
that comes over us in church. It is not something that 
the preacher has in his voice. It is not in nature, or in 
poetry, or in music — though in all these there is soothing. 
It is the mind at leisure from itself. It is the perfect 
poise of the soul; the absolute adjustment of the inward 
man to the stress of all outward things ; the prepared- 
ness against every emergency ; the stability of assured 
convictions ; the eternal calm of an invulnerable faith ; 
the repose of a heart set deep in God. It is the mood of 
the man who says, with Browning, " God's in His Heaven, 
all's well with the world." 

Two painters each painted a picture to illustrate his 
conception of rest. The first chose for his scene a still, 



22 Pax Vobiscutn. 

lone lake among the far-off mountains. The second threw 
on his canvas a thundering waterfall, with a fragile birch- 
tree bending over the foam; at the fork of a branch, al- 
most wet with the cataract's spray, a robin sat on its 
nest. The first was only Stagnation; the last was Rest. 
For in Eest there are always two elements— tranquillity 
and energy ; silence and turbulence ; creation and destruc- 
tion ; fearlessness and fearfulness. This it was in Christ. 
It is quite plain from all this that whatever else He 
claimed to be or to do, He at least knew how to live. All 
this is the perfection of living, of living in the mere sense 
of passing through the world in the best way. Hence 
His anxiety to communicate His idea of life to others. 
He came, He said, to give men life, true life, a more 
abundant life than they were living; "the life," as the 
fine phrase in the Revised Version has it, "that is life 
indeed." This is what He himself possessed, and it was 
this which He offers to all mankind. And hence His di- 
rect appeal for all to come to Him who had not made 
much of life, who were weary and heavy-laden. These 
He would teach His secret. They, also, should know 
" the life that is life indeed." 

WHAT YOKES AEE FOR. 

There is still one doubt to clear up. After the state- 
ment, " Learn of Me," Christ throws in the disconcerting 
qualification, " Take my yoke upon you and learn of Me." 
Why, if all this be true, does He call it a yoke f Why, 
while professing to give Rest, dues He with the next 
breath whisper "burden"? Is the Christian life, after 



Pax Vobiscum. 23 

all, what its enemies take it for— an additional weight to 
the already great woe of life, some extra punctiliousness 
ahout duty, some painful devotion to observances, some 
heavy restriction and trammelling of all that is joyous 
and free in the world ? Is life not hard and sorrowful 
enough without being fettered with yet another yoke ? 

It is astounding how so glaring a misunderstanding of 
this plain sentence should ever have passed into currency. 
Did you ever stop to ask what a yoke is really for? Is it 
to be a burden to the animal which wears it? It is just 
the opposite. It is to make its burden light. Attached 
to the oxen in any other way than by a yoke, the plough 
would be intolerable. Worked by means of a yoke, it is 
light. A yoke is not an instrument of torture; it is an 
instrument of mercy. It is not a malicious contrivance 
for making work hard ; it is a gentle device to make hard 
labor light. It is not meant to give pain, but to save 
pain. And yet men speak of the yoke of Christ as if it 
were a slavery, and look upon those who wear it as ob- 
jects of compassion. For generations we have had homi- 
lies on "The Yoke of Christ"— some delighting in por- 
traying its narrow exactions ; some seeking in these ex- 
actions the marks of its divinity; others apologizing for 
it, and toning it down; still others assuring us that, al- 
though it be very bad, it is not to be compared with the 
positive blessings of Christianity. How many, especially 
among the young, has this one mistaken phrase driven 
forever away from the kingdom of God ? Instead of 
making Christ attractive, it makes Him out a taskmas- 
ter, narrowing life by petty restrictions, calling for self- 
denial where none is necessary, making misery a virtue 



24 Pax Vobiscum. 

under the plea that it is the yoke of Christ, and happi- 
ness criminal because it now and then evades it. Ac- 
cording to this conception, Christians are at best the vic- 
tims of a depressing fate; their life is a penance; and 
their hope for the next world purchased by a slow mar- 
tyrdom in this. 

The mistake has arisen from taking the word " yoke" 
here in the same sense as in the expressions " under the 
yoke," or " wear the yoke in his youth." But in Christ's 
illustration it is not thejugum of the Roman soldier, but 
the simple " harness" or " ox-collar" of the Eastern peas- 
ant. It is the literal wooden yoke which He, with His 
own hands in the carpenter shop, had probably often 
made. He knew the difference between a smooth yoke 
and a rough one, a bad fit and a good fit ; the difference 
also it made to the patient animal which had to wear it. 
The rough yoke galled, and the burden was heavy; the 
smooth yoke caused no pain, and the load was lightly 
drawn. The badly fitted harness was a misery; the well- 
fitted collar was "easy." 

And what was the " burden "? It was not some special 
burden laid upon the Christian, some unique infliction 
that they alone must bear. It was what all men bear. 
It was simply life, human life itself, the general burden 
of life which all must carry with them from the cradle to 
the grave. Christ saw that men took life painfully. To 
some it was a weariness, to others a failure, to many a 
tragedy, to all a struggle and a pain. How to carry this 
burden of life had been the whole world's problem. It is 
still the whole world's problem. And here is Christ's so- 
lution: " Carry it as I do. Take life as I take it. Look 



Pax Vobiscnm. 2$ 

at it from My point of view. Interpret it upon My prin- 
ciples. Take My yoke and learn of Me, and you will find 
it easy. For My yoke is easy, works easily, sits right 
upon the shoulders, and therefore My burden is light." 

There is no suggestion here that religion will absolve 
any man from bearing burdens. That would be to absolve 
him from living, since it is life itself that is the burden. 
What Christianity does propose is to make it tolerable. 
Christ's yoke is simply His secret for the alleviation of 
human life, His prescription for the best and happiest 
method of living. Men harness themselves to the work 
and stress of the world in clumsy and unnatural ways. 
The harness they put on is antiquated. A rough, ill- 
fitted collar at the best, they make its strain and fric- 
tion past enduring, by placing it where the neck is most 
sensitive ; and by mere continuous irritation this sensi- 
tiveness increases until the whole nature is quick and 
sore. 

This is the origin, among other things, of a disease 
called " touchiness" — a disease which, in spite of its inno- 
cent name, is one of the gravest sources of restlessness in 
the world. Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a 
morbid condition of the inward disposition. It is self- 
love inflamed to the acute point; conceit, with a hair- 
trigger. The cure is to shift the yoke to some other 
place ; to let men and things touch us through some new 
and perhaps as yet unused part of our nature ; to become 
meek and lowly in heart while the old sensitiveness is 
becoming numb from want of use. It is the beautiful 
work of Christianity everywhere to adjust the burden 
of life to those who bear it, and them to it. It has a per- 



26 Pax Vobiscum. 

f ectly miraculous gift of healing. Without doing any vio- 
lence to human nature it sets it right with life, harmon- 
izing it with all surrounding things, and restoring those 
who are jaded with the fatigue and dust of the world to 
a new grace of living. In the mere matter of altering 
the perspective of life and changing the proportions of 
things, its function in lightening the care of man is alto- 
gether its own. The weight of a load depends upon the 
attraction of the earth. Suppose the attraction of the 
earth were removed ? A ton on some other planet, where 
the attraction of gravity is less, does not weigh half a 
ton. Now Christianity removes the attraction of the 
earth; and this is one way in which it diminishes man's 
burden. It makes them citizens of another world. What 
was a ton yesterday is not half a ton to-day. So without 
changing one's circumstances, merely by offering a wider 
horizon and a different standard, it alters the whole as- 
pect of the world. 

Christianity as Christ taught is the truest philosophy 
of life ever spoken. But let us be quite sure when we 
speak of Christianity that we mean Christ's Christianity. 
Other versions are either caricatures, or exaggerations, or 
misunderstandings, or shortsighted and surface readings. 
For the most part their attainment is hopeless and the 
results wretched. But I care not who the person is, or 
through what vale of tears he has passed, or is about to 
pass, there is a new life for him along this path. 



Pax Vobiscum. 27 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 

Were Rest my subject, there are other things I should 
wish to say about it, and other kinds of Rest of which I 
should like to speak. But that is not my subject. My 
theme is that the Christian experiences are not the work 
of magic, but come under the law of Cause and Effect. 
And I have chosen Rest only as a single illustration of 
the working of that principle. If there were time I 
might next run overall the Christian experiences in turn, 
and show how the same wide law applies to each. But I 
think it may serve the better purpose if I leave this 
further exercise to yourselves. I know no Bible study 
that you will find more full of fruit, or which will take 
you nearer to the ways of God, or make the Christian 
life itself more solid or more sure. I shall add only a 
single other illustration of what I mean, before I close. 

Where does Joy come from ? I knew a Sunday scholar 
whose conception of Joy was that it was a thing made in 
lumps and kept somewhere in Heaven, and that when 
people prayed for it, pieces were somehow let down and 
fitted into their souls. I am not sure that views as gross 
and material are not often held by people who ought to 
be wiser. In reality, Joy is as much a matter of Cause and 
Effect as pain. No one can get Joy by merely asking for 
it. It is one of the ripest fruits of the Christian life, and, 
like all fruits, must be grown. There is a very clever 
trick in India called the mango-trick. A seed is put in 



28 Pax Vobisaim. 

the ground and covered up, and after diverse incantations 
a full-blown mango-bush appears within five minutes. 
I never met any one who knew how the thing was done, 
but I never met any one who believed it to be anything 
else than a con juring-trick. The world is pretty unani- 
mous now in its belief in the orderliness of Nature. Men 
may not know how fruits grow, but they do know that 
they cannot grow in an hour. Some lives have not even 
a stalk on which fruits could hang, even if they did grow 
in an hour. Some have never planted one sound seed of 
Joy in all their lives ; and others who may have planted 
a germ or two have lived so little in sunshine that they 
never could come to maturity. 

Whence, then, is Joy ? Christ put His teaching upon 
this subject into one of the most exquisite of His para- 
bles. I should in any instance have appealed to His 
teaching here, as in the case of Rest, for I do not wish 
you to think I am speaking words of my own. But it so 
happens that He has dealt with it in words of unusual 
fulness. 

I need not recall the whole illustration. It is the para- 
ble of the Vine. Did you ever think why Christ spoke 
that parable ? He did not merely throw it into space 
as a fine illustration of general truths. It was not simply 
a statement of the mystical union, and the doctrine of 
an indwelling Christ. It was that; but it was more. 
After He had said it, He did what was not an unusual 
thing when He w r as teaching His greatest lessons. He 
turned to the disciples and said He would tell them why 
He had spoken it. It was to tell them how to get Joy. 
" These things have I spoken unto you," He said, " that 



Pax Vobisciun. 29 

My Joy might remain in you and that your Joy might 
be full." It was a purposed and deliberate communica- 
tion of His secret of Happiness. 

Go back over these verses, then, and you will find the 
Causes of this Effect, the spring, and the only spring, out 
of which true Happiness comes. I am not going to ana- 
lyze them in detail. T ask you to enter into the words 
for yourselves. Remember, in the first place, that the 
Vine was the Eastern symbol of Joy. It was its fruit 
that made glad the heart of man. Yet, however inno- 
cent that gladness — for the expressed juice of the grape 
was the common drink at every peasant's board— the 
gladness was only a gross and passing thing. This was 
not true happiness, and the vine of the Palestine vine- 
yards was not the true vine. Christ was "the true 
Vine." Here, then, is the ultimate source of Joy. 
Through whatever media it reaches us, all true Joy and 
Gladness find their source in Christ. By this, of course, 
is not meant that the actual Joy experienced is trans- 
ferred from Christ's nature, or is something passed on 
from Him to us. What is passed on is His method of 
getting it. There is, indeed, a sense in which we can 
share another's joy or another's sorrow. But that is 
another matter. Christ is the source of Joy to men in 
the sense in which He is the source of Rest. His people 
share His life, and therefore share its consequences, and 
one of these is Joy. His method of living is one that in 
the nature of things produces Joy. When He spoke of 
His Joy remaining with us He meant in part that the 
causes which produced it should continue to act. His 
followers, that is to say, by repeating His life would ex- 



30 Pax Vobiscttm. 

perience its accompaniments. His Joy, His kind of Joy, 
would remain with them. 

The medium through which this Joy comes is next ex- 
plained: "He that abideth in Me, the same bringeth 
forth much fruit." Fruit first, Joy next; the one the 
cause or medium of the other. Fruit-bearing is the 
necessary antecedent; Joy both the necessary conse- 
quent and the necessary accompaniment. It lay partly 
in the bearing fruit, partly in the fellowship which made 
that possible. Partly, that is to say, Joy lay in mere 
constant living in Christ's presence, with all that that 
implied of peace, of shelter, and of love ; partly in the 
influence of that Life upon mind and character and will; 
and partly in the inspiration to live and work for others, 
with all that that brought of self-riddance and joy in 
others' gain. All these, in different ways and at different 
times, are sources of pure Happiness. Even the simplest 
of them— to do good to other people— is an instant and 
infallible specific. There is no mystery about Happiness 
whatever. Put in the right ingredients and it must come 
out. He that abideth in Him will bring forth much 
fruit ; and bringing forth much fruit is Happiness. The 
infallible receipt for Happiness, then, is to do good; and 
the infallible receipt for doing good is to abide in Christ. 
The surest proof that all this is a plain matter of Cause 
and Effect is that men may try every other conceivable 
way of finding happiness, and they will fail. Only the 
right cause in each case can produce the right effect. 

Then the Christian experiences are our own making ? 
In the same sense in which grapes are our own making, 
and no more. All fruits grow— whether they grow in the 



Pax Vobiscwn. 31 

soil or in the soul; whether they are the fruits of the 
wild grape or of the True Vine. No man can make things 
grow. He can get them to grow by arranging all the 
circumstances and fulfilling all the conditions. But the 
growing is done by God. Causes and effects are eternal 
arrangements, set in the constitution of the world ; fixed 
beyond man's ordering. What man can do is to place 
himself in the midst of a chain of sequences. Thus he 
cen get things to grow : thus he himself can grow. But 
the grower is the Spirit of God. 

What more need I add but this — test the method by 
experiment. Do not imagine that you have got these 
things because you know how to get them. As well try 
to feed upon a cookery book. But I think I can promise 
that if you try in this simple and natural way, you will 
not fail. Spend the time you have spent in sighing for 
fruits in fulfilling the conditions of their growth. The 
fruits will come, must come. We have hitherto paid 
immense attention to effects, to the mere experiences 
themselves; we have described them, extolled them, 
advised them, prayed for them — done everything but 
find out what caused them. Henceforth let us deal with 
causes. "To be," says Lotze, u is to be in relations." 
About every other method of living the Christian life 
there is an uncertainty. About every other method of 
acquiring the Christian experiences there is a "perhaps." 
But in so far as this method is the way of nature, it can- 
not fail. Its guarantee is the laws of the universe— and 
these are '■' the Hands of the Living God," 



32 Pax Vobiscum. 



THE TRUE VINE. 

a I am the true vine, and my Father is the husband- 
man. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he 
taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he 
purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye 
are clean through the word which I have spoken unto 
you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot 
bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine ; no more 
can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the 
branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same 
bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do 
nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a 
branch, and is withered ; and men gather them, and cast 
them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in me, 
and my word abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and 
it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, 
that ye bear much fruit; so ye shall be my disciples. 
As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you : con- 
tinue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye 
shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's 
commandments, and abide in his love. These things 
have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in 
you, and tha\ your joy might be full." 



THE END. 



THE GREATEST THING- IN 
THE WORLD. 



Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and 
have not Love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling 
cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and under- 
stand all mysteries, and all knowledge ; and though I have all 
faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not Love, I am 
nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, 
and though I give my body to be burned, and have not Love, it 
profiteth me nothing. 



Love suffereth long, and is kind ; 

Love envieth not ; 

Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 

Doth not behave itself unseemly, 

Seeketh not her own, 

Is not easily provoked, 

Thinketh no evil : 

Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth ; 

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, 

endureth all things. 



Love never faileth : but whether there be prophecies, they 
shall fail ; whether there be tongues, they shall cease ; whether 
there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, 
and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is 
come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I 
was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought 
as a child : but when I became a mao, I put away childish things. 
For now we see through a glass, darkly ; but then face to face : 
now I know in part ; but then shall I know even as also I am 
known. And now abideth faith, hope, Love, these three ; but 
the greatest of these is Love. — 1 Cor. xiii. 



THE 

GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD. 



Every one has asked himself the great question of 
antiquity as of the modern world : What is the summum 
bonum— the supreme good ? You have life before you. 
Once only you can live it. What is the noblest object of 
desire, the supreme gift to covet ? 

We have been accustomed to be told that the greatest 
thing in the religious world is Faith. That great word 
has been the key-note for centuries of the popular relig- 
ion ; and we have easily learned to look upon it as the 
greatest thing in the world. Well, we are wrong. If we 
have been told that, we may miss the mark. I have 
taken you, in the chapter which I have just read, to 
Christianity at its source; and there we have seen, " The 
greatest of these is love." It is not an oversight. Paul 
was speaking of faith just a moment before. He says, 
" If I have all faith, so that I can remove mountains, and 
have not love, I am nothing." So far from forgetting, 
he deliberately contrasts them, "Now abideth Faith, 
Hope, Love," and without a moment's hesitation the 

decision falls, 4t The greatest of these is Love." 

37 



38 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

And it is not prejudice. A man is apt to recommend 
to others his own strong point. Love was not Paul's 
strong point. The observing student can detect a beauti- 
ful tenderness growing and ripening all through his 
character as Paul gets old; but the hand that wrote, 
" The greatest of these is love," when we meet it first, is 
stained with blood. 

Nor is this letter to the Corinthians peculiar in singling 
out love as the summum bonum. The masterpieces of 
Christianity are agreed about it. Peter says, u Above all 
things have fervent love among yourselves." Above all 
things. And John goes farther, "God is love." And 
you remember the profound remark which Paul makes 
elsewhere, " Love is the fulfilling of the law." Did you 
ever think what he meant by that ? In those days men 
were working their passage to Heaven by keeping the 
Ten Commandments, and the hundred and ten other 
commandments which. they had manufactured out of 
them. Christ said, I will show you a more simple way. 
If you do one thing, you will do these hundred and ten 
things, without ever thinking about them. If you love, 
you will unconsciously fulfil the whole law. And you 
can readily see for yourselves how that must be so. Take 
any of the commandments. " Thou shalt have no other 
gods before Me." If a man love God, you will not require 
to tell him that. Love is the fulfilling of that law. 
u Take not His name in vain." Would he ever dream of 
taking His name in vain if he loved Him ? "Kemember 
the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Would he not be too 
glad to have one day in seven to dedicate more exclu- 
sively to the object of his affection ? Love would fulfil all 



The Greatest Thing in the World. 39 

these laws regarding God. And so, if he loved Man, you 
would never think of telling him to honor his father 
and mother. He could not do anything else. It would 
be preposterous to tell him not to kill. You could only 
insult him if you suggested that he should not steal — how 
could he steal from those he loved ? It would be super- 
fluous to beg him not to bear false witness against his 
neighbor. If he loved him it would be the last thing he 
would do. And you would never dream of urging him 
not to covet what his neighbors had. He would rather 
they possessed it than himself. In this way " Love is the 
fulfilling of the law." It is the rule for fulfilling all 
rules, the new commandment for keeping all the old 
commandments, Christ's one secret of the Christian life. 

Now Paul had learned that ; and in this noble eulogy 
he has given us the most wonderful and original account 
extant of the summum bonum. We may divide it into 
three parts. In the beginning of the short chapter, we 
have Love contrasted; in the heart of it, we have Love 
analyzed ; towards the end, we have Love defended as 
the supreme gift. 

THE CONTRAST. 

Paul begins by contrasting Love with other things 
that men in those days thought much of. I shall not 
attempt to go over those things in detail. Their in- 
feriority is already obvious. 

He contrasts it with eloquence. And what a noble 
gift it is, the power of playing upon the souls and wills 
of men, and rousing them to lofty purposes and holy 
deeds. Paul says, "If I speak with the tongues of men 



40 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sound- 
ing brass, or a tinkling cymbal." And we all know 
why. We have all felt the brazenness of words without 
emotion, the hollowness, the unaccountable unpersua- 
siveness, of eloquence behind which lies no Love. 

He contrasts it with prophecy. He contrasts it with 
mysteries. He contrasts it with faith. He contrasts it 
with charity. Why is Love greater than faith ? Be- 
cause the end is greater than the means. And why 
is it greater than charity ? Because the whole is greater 
than the part. Love is greater than faith, because Me 
end is greater than the means. What is the use of 
having faith ? It is to connect the soul with God. 
And what is the object of connecting man with God ? 
That he may become like God. But God is Love. 
Hence Faith, the means, is in order to Love, the end. 
Love, therefore, obviously is greater than faith. It is 
greater than charity, again, because the whole is greater 
than a part. Charity is only a little bit of Love, one of 
the innumerable avenues of Love, and there may even 
be, and there is, a great deal of charity without Love. 
It is a very easy thing to toss a copper to a beggar on 
the street ; it is generally an easier thing than not to do 
it. Yet Love is just as often in the withholding. We 
purchase relief from the sympathetic feelings roused by 
the spectacle of misery, at the copper's cost. It is too 
cheap— too cheap for us, and often too dear for the beg- 
gar. If we really loved him we would either do more 
for him, or less. 

Then Paul contrasts it with sacrifice and martyrdom. 
And I beg the little band of would-be missionaries— and 



The Greatest Thi7ig in the World. 41 

I have the honor to call some of you by this name for 
the first time— to remember that though you give your 
bodies to be burned, and have not Love, it profits 
nothing— nothing ! You can take nothing greater to the 
heathen world than the impress and reflection of the 
Love of God upon your own character. That is the 
universal language. It will take you years to speak in 
Chinese, or in the dialects of India. From the day you 
]and, that language of Love, understood by all, will be 
pouring forth its unconscious eloquence. It is the man 
who is the missionary, it is not his words. His charac- 
ter is his message. In the heart of Africa, among the 
great Lakes, I have come across black men and women 
who remembered the only white man they ever saw be- 
fore—David Livingstone ; and as you cross his footsteps in 
that dark continent, men's faces light up as they speak of 
the kind Doctor who passed there years ago. They could 
not understand him; but they felt the Love that beat in 
his heart. Take into your new sphere of labor, where 
you also mean to lay down your life, that simple charm, 
and your lifework must succeed. You can take nothing 
greater, you need not take nothing less. It is not worth 
while going if you take anything less. You may take 
every accomplishment ; you may be braced for every 
sacrifice ; but if you give your body to be burned, and 
have not Love, it will profit you and the cause of Christ 
nothing. 

THE ANALYSIS. 

After contrasting Love with these things, Paul, in 
three verses, very short, gives us an amazing analysis of 



42 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

what this supreme thing is. I ask you to look at it. It 
is a compound thing, he tells us. It is like light. As 
you have seen a man of science take a beam of light and 
pass it through a crystal prism, as you have seen it come 
ont on the other side of the prism broken up into its 
component colors— red, and blue, and yellow, and violet, 
and orange, and all the colors of the rainbow— so Paul 
passes this thing, Love, through the magnificent prism 
of his inspired intellect, and it comes out on the other 
side broken up into its elements. And in these few 
words we have what one might call the Spectrum of 
Love, the analysis of Love. Will you observe what its 
elements are ? "Will you notice that they have common 
names; that they are virtues which we hear about every 
day, that they are things which can be practised by 
every man in every place in life; and how, by a multi- 
tude of small things and ordinary virtues, the supreme 
thing, the summum bonum, is made up ? 

The Spectrum of Love has nine ingredients:— 
Patience . . u Love suffereth long." 
Kindness . . " And is kind." 
Generosity . " Love envieth not." 
Humility . u Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed 

up." 
Courtesy . . " Doth not behave itself unseemly." 
Unselfishness " Seeketh not her own." 
Good Temper " Is not easily provoked." 
Guilelessness " Thinketh no evil." 
Sincerity . . " Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth 

in the truth." 



The Greatest Thing in the World. 43 

Patience; kindness; generosity; humility; courtesy; 
unselfishness; good temper; guilelessness ; sincerity — 
these make up the supreme gift, the stature of the per- 
fect man. You will observe that all are in relation to 
men, in relation to life, in relation to the known to-day 
and the near to-morrow, and not to the unknown eter- 
nity. We hear much of love to G-od ; Christ spoke much 
of love to man. We make a great deal of peace with 
heaven ; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion 
is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the 
secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through 
this temporal world. The supreme thing, in short, is not 
a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the 
multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum 
of every common day. 

There is no time to do more than make a passing note 
upon each of these ingredients. Love is Patience. This 
is the normal attitude of Love ; Love passive, Love wait- 
ing to begin \ not in a hurry ; calm ; ready to do its work 
when the summons comes, but meantime wearing the 
ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. Love suffers long; 
beareth all things; believeth all things; hopeth all 
things. For Love understands, and therefore waits. 

Kindness. Love active. Have you ever noticed how 
much of Christ's life was spent in doing kind things— in 
merely doing kind things ? Run over it with that in 
view, and you will find that He spent a great proportion 
of His time simply in making people happy, in doing 
good turns to people. There is only one thing greater 
than happiness in the world, and that is holiness; and it 
is not in our keeping; but what God has put in our 



44 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

power is the happiness of those about us, and that is 
largely to be secured by our being kind to them. 

"The greatest thing," says some one, "a man can do 
for his Heavenly Father is to be kind to some of His 
other children." I wonder why it is that we are not all 
kinder than we are ? How much the world needs it ! 
How easily it is done! How instantaneously it acts! 
How infallibly it is remembered ! How superabundantly 
it pays itself back!— for there is no debtor in the world so 
honorable, so superbly honorable, as Love. "Love 
never faileth." Love is success, Love is happiness, Love 
is life. "Love, I say," with Browning, "is energy of 
Life." 

" For life, with all it yields of joy or woe 
And hope and fear, 

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love, — 
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is." 

Where Love is, God is. He that dwelleth in Love 
dwelleth in God. God is Love. Therefore love. With- 
out distinction, without calculation, without procrasti- 
nation, love. Lavish it upon the poor, where it is very 
easy ; especially upon the rich, who often need it most ; 
most of all upon our equals, where it is very difficult, 
and for whom perhaps we each do least of all. There is 
a difference between trying to please audi giving pleasure. 
Give pleasure, Lose no chance of giving pleasure. For 
that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly 
loving spirit. "I shall pass through this world but 
once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any 
kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do 



The Greatest Tiring in the World. 45 

it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not 
pass this way again." 

Generosity. "Love envieth not." This is love in com- 
petition with others. Whenever you attempt a good 
work you will find other men doing the same kind of 
work, and probably doing it better. Envy them not. 
Envy is a feeling of ill-will to those who are in the same 
line as ourselves, a spirit of covetousness and detraction. 
How little Christian work even is a protection against 
un-Christian feeling! That most despicable of all the un- 
worthy moods which cloud a Christian's soul assuredly 
waits for us on the threshold of every work, unless we 
are fortified with this grace of magnanimity. Only one 
thing truly need the Christian envy, the large, rich, 
generous soul which " envieth not." 

And then, after having learned all that, you have to 
learn this further thing, Humility— to put a seal upon 
your lips and forget what you have done. After you 
have been kind, after Love has stolen forth into the 
world and done its beautiful work, go back into the 
shade again and say nothing about it. Love hides even 
from itself . Love waives even self-satisfaction. "Love 
vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." 

The fifth ingredient is a somewhat strange one to find in 
this summum bonum : Courtesy. This is Love in society, 
Love in relation to etiquette. "Love doth not behave 
itself unseemly." Politeness has been defined as love in 
trifles. Courtesy is said to be love in little things. And 
the one secret of politeness is to love. Love cannot be- 
have itself unseemly. You can put the most untutored 
persons into the highest society, and if they have a 



46 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

reservoir of Love in their heart, they will not behave 
themselves unseemly. They simply cannot do it. Car- 
lyle said of Eobert Burns that there was no truer gentle- 
man in Europe than the ploughman-poet. It was be- 
cause he loved everything — the mouse, and the daisy, 
and all the things, great and small, that God had made. 
So with this simple passport he could mingle with any 
society, and enter courts and palaces from his little cot- 
tage on the banks of the Ayr. You know the meaning 
of the word " gentleman." It means a gentle man— a 
man who does things gently with love. And that is the 
whole art and mystery of it. The gentle man cannot in 
the nature of things do an ungentle, an ungentlemanly 
thing. The ungentle soul, the inconsiderate, unsympa- 
thetic nature cannot do anything else. " Love doth not 
behave itself unseemly." 

Unselfishness. "Love seeketh not her own." Ob- 
serve: Seeketh not even that which is her own. In 
Britain the Englishman is devoted, and rightly, to his 
rights. But there come times when a man may exercise 
even the higher right of giving up his rights. Yet Paul 
does not summon us to give up our rights. Love strikes 
much deeper. It would have us not seek them at all, 
ignore them, eliminate the personal element altogether 
from our calculations. It is not hard to give up our 
rights. They are often external. The difficult thing 
is to give up ourselves. The more difficult thing still 
is not to seek things for ourselves at all. After we have 
sought them, bought them, won them, deserved them, 
we have taken the cream off them for ourselves already. 
Little cross then perhaps to give them up. But not to 



The Greatest Thing in the World. 47 

seek them, to look every man not on his own things, but 
on the things of others— id opus est. "Seekest thou 
great things for thyself ?" said the prophet; "'seek them 
not." Why ? Because there is no greatness in things. 
Things cannot be great. The only greatness is unselfish 
love. Even self-denial in itself is nothing, is almost a 
mistake. Only a great purpose or a mightier love can 
justify the waste. It is more difficult, I have said, not 
to seek our own at all than, having sought it, to give it 
up. I must take that back. It is only true of a partly 
selfish heart. Nothing is a hardship to Love, and 
nothing is hard. I believe that Christ's yoke is easy. 
Christ's "' yoke " is just His way of taking life. And I 
believe it is an easier way than any other. I believe it is 
a happier way than any other. The most obvious lesson 
in Christ's teaching is that there is no happiness in hav- 
ing and getting anything, but only in giving. I repeat, 
there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in 
giving. And half the world is on the wrong scent in the 
pursuit of happiness. They think it consists in having 
and getting, and in being served by others. It consists 
in giving, and in serving others. He that would be 
great among you, said Christ, let him serve. He that 
would be happy, let him remember that there is but one 
way— it is more blessed, it is more happy, to give than to 
receive. 

The next ingredient is a very remarkable one : Good 
Temper. " Love is not easily provoked." Nothing could 
be more striking than to find this here. We are inclined 
to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness. 
We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family 



48 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take 
into very serious account in estimating a man's charac- 
ter. And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of 
love, it finds a place ; and the Bible again and again re- 
turns to condemn it as one of the most destructive ele- 
ments in human nature. 

The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of 
the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise 
noble character. You know men who are all but per- 
fect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for 
an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy" dispo- 
sition. This compatibility of ill temper with high moral 
character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of 
ethics. The truth is there are two great classes of sins — 
sins of the Body, and sins of the Disposition. The 
Prodigal Son may be taken as a type of the first, the 
Elder Brother of the second. Now society has no doubt 
whatever as to which of these is the worse. Its brand 
falls, without a challenge, upon the Prodigal. But are 
we right ? We have no balance to weigh one another's 
sins, and coarser and finer are but human words ; but 
faults in the higher nature may be less venial than those 
in the lower, and to the eye of Him who is Love, a sin 
against Love may seem a hundred times more base. No 
form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not 
drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society 
than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up 
communities, for destroying the most sacred relation- 
ships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and 
women, for taking the bloom off childhood, in short, for 
sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence 



The Greatest Tiling in the World. 49 

stands alone. Look at the Elder Brother, moral, hard- 
working, patient, dutiful—let him get all credit for his 
virtues — look at this man, this baby, sulking outside his 
own father's door. "He was angry," we read, "and 
would not go in." Look at the effect upon the father, 
upon the servants, upon the happiness of the guests. 
Judge of the effect upon the Prodigal — and how many 
prodigals are kept out of the Kingdom of God by the 
unlovely character of those who profess to be inside? 
Analyze, as a study in Temper, the thunder-cloud itself 
as it gathers upon the Elder Brother's brow. What is 
it made of? Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, 
self-righteousness, touchiness, doggedness, sullenness — 
these are the ingredients of this dark and loveless soul. 
In varying proportions, also, these are the ingredients of 
all ill temper. Judge if such sins of the disposition are 
not worse to live in, and for others to live with, than sins 
of the body. Did Christ indeed not answer the question 
Himself when He said, "I say unto you, that the pub- 
licans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of Heaven 
before you" ? There is really no place in Heaven for a 
disposition like this. A man with such a mood could 
only make Heaven miserable for all the people in it. 
Except, therefore, such a man be born again, he cannot, 
he simply cannot, enter the Kingdom of Heaven. For it 
is perfectly certain— and you will not misunderstand 
me — that to enter Heaven a man must take it with him. 
You will see then why Temper is significant. It is not 
in what it is alone, but in what it reveals. This is why 
I take the liberty now of speaking of it with such un- 
usual plainness. It is a test for love, a symptom, a reve- 



50 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

t 

lation of an unloving nature at bottom. It is the inter- 
mittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease 
within; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface 
which betrays some rottenness underneath ; a sample of 
the most hidden products of the soul dropped involun- 
tarily when off one's guard; in a word, the lightning 
form of a hundred hideous and un-Christian sins. For a 
want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of gen- 
erosity, a want of courtesy, a want of unselfishness, are 
all instantaneously symbolized in one flash of Temper. 

Hence it is not enough to deal with the Temper. We 
must go to the sour ce, and change the inmost nature, 
and the angry humors will die away of themselves. 
Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, 
but by putting something in — a great Love, a new Spirit, 
the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Spirit of Christ, inter- 
penetrating ours, sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This 
only can eradicate what is wrong, work a chemical 
change, renovate and regenerate, and rehabilitate the 
inner man. Will-power does not change men. Time 
does not change men. Christ does. Therefore "Let 
that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." 
Some of us have not much time to lose. Eemember, 
once more, that this is a matter of life or death. I can- 
not help speaking urgently, for myself, for yourselves. 
" Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, which 
believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone 
were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned 
in the depth of the sea." That is to say, it is the delib- 
erate verdict of the Lord Jesus that it is better not to live 
than not to love. It is better not to live than not to love. 



The Greatest Thing in the World. 5 1 

Guilelessness and Sincerity may be dismissed almost 
with a word. Guilelessness is the grace for suspicious 
people. And the possession of it is the great secret 
of personal influence. You will find, if you think for a 
moment, that the people who influence you are people 
who believe in you. In an atmosphere of suspicion men 
shrivel up; but in that atmosphere they expand, and 
find encouragement and educative fellowship. It is a 
wonderful thing that here and there in this hard, un- 
charitable world there should still be left a few rare souls 
who think no evil. This is the great unworldliness. 
Love "thinketh no evil," imputes no motive, sees the 
bright side, puts the best construction on every action. 
What a delightful state of mind to live in ! What a 
stimulus and benediction even to meet with it for a day ! 
To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to influence 
or elevate others, we shall soon see that success is in pro- 
portion to their belief of our belief in them. For the 
respect of another is the first restoration of the self- 
respect a man has lost; our ideal of what he is becomes 
to him the hope and pattern of what he may become. 

" Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the 
truth." I have called this Sincerity from the words 
rendered in the Authorized Version by "rejoiceth in the 
truth." And, certainly, were this the real translation, 
nothing could be more just. For he who loves will love 
Truth not less than men. He will rejoice in the Truth— 
rejoice not in what he has been taught to believe ; not in 
this Church's doctrine or in that ; not in this ism or in 
that ism; but u in the Truth." He will accept only what 
is real ; he will strive to get at facts ; he will search for 



52 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

Truth with a humble and unbiassed mind, and cherish 
whatever he finds at any sacrifice. But the more literal 
translation of the Eevised Version calls for just such a 
sacrifice for truth's sake here. For what Paul really- 
meant is, as we there read, "Rejoiceth not in unright- 
eousness, but rejoiceth with the truth," a quality which 
probably no one English word— and certainly not Sin- 
cerity—adequately defines. It includes, perhaps more 
strictly, the self-restraint which refuses to make capital 
out of others' faults; the charity which delights not in 
exposing the weakness of others, but "covereth all 
things;" the sincerity of purpose which endeavors to see 
things as they are, and rejoices to find them better than 
suspicion feared or calumny denounced. 

So much for the analysis of Love. Now the business 
of our lives is to have these things fitted into our charac- 
ters. That is the supreme work to which we need to 
address ourselves in this world, to learn Love. Is life 
not full of opportunities for learning Love ? Every man 
and woman every day has a thousand of them. The 
world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is 
not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal 
lesson for us all is how better ive can love. What makes 
a man a good cricketer ? Practice. What makes a man 
a good artist, a good sculptor, a good musician ? Prac- 
tice. What makes a man a good linguist, a good sten- 
ographer ? Practice. What makes a man a good man ? 
Practice. Nothing else. There is nothing capricious 
about religion. We do not get the soul in different ways, 
under different laws, from those in which we get the 
body and the mind, If a man does not exercise his arm 



The Greatest Thing in the World. 53 

he develops no biceps muscle; and if a man does not ex- 
ercise his soul, he acquires no muscle in his soul, no 
strength of character, no vigor of moral fibre, nor beauty 
of spiritual growth. Love is not a thing of enthusiastic 
emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression 
of the whole round Christian character— the Christlike 
nature in its fullest development. And the constituents 
of this great character are only to be built up by ceaseless 
practice. 

What was Christ doing in the carpenter's shop? 
Practising. Though perfect, we read that He learned 
obedience, and grew in wisdom and in favor with God. 
Do not quarrel therefore with your lot in life. Do not 
complain of its never-ceasing cares, its petty environ- 
ment, the vexations you have to stand, the small and 
sordid souls you have to live and work with. Above all, 
do not resent temptation ; do not be perplexed because it 
seems to thicken round you more and more, and ceases 
neither for effort nor for agony nor prayer. That is your 
practice. That is the practice which God appoints you; 
and it is having its work in making you patient, and 
humble, and generous, and unselfish, and kind, and 
courteous. Do not grudge the hand that is moulding the 
still too shapeless image within you. It is growing more 
beautiful, though you see it not, and every touch of 
temptation may add to its perfection. Therefore keep in 
the midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among 
men, and among things, and among troubles, and diffi- 
culties, and obstacles. You remember Goethe's words : 
Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Dock ein Charac- 
ter in dem Strom der Welt. " Talent develops itself in 



54 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

solitude; Character in the stream of life." Talent de- 
velops itself in solitude— the talent of prayer, of faith, of 
meditation, of seeing the unseen; Character grows in the 
stream of the world's life. That chiefly is where men are 
to learn love. 

How ? Now, how ? To make it easier, I have named 
a few of the elements of love. But these are only ele- 
ments. Love itself can never be defined. Light is a 
something more than the sum of its ingredients— a glow- 
ing, dazzling, tremulous ether. And love is something 
more than all its elements— a palpitating, quivering, sen- 
sitive, living thing. By synthesis of all the colors, men 
can make whiteness, they cannot make light. By syn- 
thesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they 
cannot make love. How then are we to have this trans- 
cendent living whole conveyed into our souls ? We brace 
our wills to secure it. We try to copy those who have 
it. We lay down rules about it. We watch. We pray. 
But these things alone will not bring Love into our nature. 
Love is an effect. And only as we fulfil the right condi- 
tion can we have the effect produced. Shall I tell you 
what the cause is ? 

If you turn to the Eevised Version of the First Epistle 
of John you will find these words: "We love because He 
first loved us." " We love," not " We love Him" That 
is the way the old version has it, and it is quite wrong. 
" We love— because He first loved us." Look at that 
word " because." It is the cause of which I have spoken. 
"Because He first loved us," the effect follows that we 
love, we love Him, we love all men. We cannot help it. 
Because He loved us, we love, we love everybody. Our 



The Greatest Tiling in the World. 55 

heart is slowly changed. Contemplate the love of Christ, 
and you will love. Stand before that mirror, reflect 
Christ's character, and you will be changed into the same 
image from tenderness to tenderness. There is no other 
way. You cannot love to order. You can only look at 
the lovely object, and fall in love with it, and grow into 
likeness to it. And so look at this Perfect Character, this 
Perfect Life. Look at the great Sacrifice as He laid 
down Himself, all through life, and upon the Cross of 
Calvary; and you must love Him. And loving Him, 
you must become like Him. Love begets love. It is a 
process of induction. Put a piece of iron in the presence 
of an electrified body, and that piece of iron for a time 
becomes electrified. It is changed into a temporary 
magnet in the mere presence of a permanent magnet, 
and as long as you leave the two side by side, they are 
both magnets alike. Eemain side by side with Him who 
loved us, and gave Himself for us, and you too will be- 
come a permanent magnet, a permanently attractive 
force ; and like Him you will draw all men unto you, like 
Him you will be drawn unto all men. That is the inevi- 
table effect of Love. Any man who fulfils that cause 
must have that effect produced in him. Try to gi\ r e up 
the idea that religion comes to us by chance, or by mys- 
tery, or by caprice. It comes to us by natural law, or 
by supernatural law, for all law is Divine. Edward 
Irving went to see a dying boy once, and when he en- 
tered the room he just put his hand on the sufferer's 
head, and said, "My boy, God loves you," and went 
away. And the boy started from his bed, and called out 
to the people in the house, " God loves me ! God loves 



56 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

me 1" It changed that boy. The sense that God loved 
him overpowered him, melted him down, and began the 
creating of a new heart in him. And that is how the 
love of God melts down the unlovely heart in man, and 
begets in him the new creature, who is patient and 
humble and gentle and unselfish. And there is no other 
way to get it. There is no mystery about it. We love 
others, we love everybody, we love our enemies, because 
He first loved us. 

THE DEFENCE. 

Now I have a closing sentence or two to add about 
Paul's reason for singling out love as the supreme posses- 
sion. It is a very remarkable reason. In a single word 
it is this: it lasts. " Love," urges Paul, " never faileth." 
Then he begins again one of his marvellous lists of the 
great things of the day, and exposes them one by one. 
He runs over the things that men thought were going to 
last, and shows that they are all fleeting, temporary, 
passing away. 

" Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail." It 
was the mother's ambition for her boy in those days that 
he should become a prophet. For hundreds of years God 
had never spoken by means of any prophet, and at that 
time the prophet was greater than the King. Men waited 
wistfully for another messenger to come, and hung upon 
his lips when he appeared as upon the very voice of God. 
Paul says, ''Whether there be prophecies, they shall 
fail." This Book is full of prophecies. One by one they 
have " failed"; that is, having been fulfilled their work 



The Greatest Thing in the World. 57 

is finished ; they have nothing more to do now in the 
world except to feed a devout man's faith. 

Then Paul talks about tongues. That was another 
thing that was greatly coveted. u Whether there be 
tongues, they shall cease." As we all know, many, 
many centuries have passed since tongues have been 
known in this world. They have ceased. Take it in any 
sense you like. Take it, for illustration merely, as lan- 
guages in general— a sense which was not in Paul's mind 
at all, and which though it cannot give us the specific 
lesson will point the general truth. Consider the words 
in which these chapters were written— Greek. It has 
gone. Take the Latin— the other great tongue of those 
days. It ceased long ago. Look at the Indian language. 
It is ceasing. The language of Wales, of Ireland, of the 
Scottish Highlands is dying before our eyes. The most 
popular book in the English tongue at the present time, 
except the Bible, is one of Dickens's works, his Pickwick 
Papers. It is largely written in the language of London 
street-life ; and experts assure us that in fifty years it 
will be unintelligible to the average English reader. 

Then Paul goes farther, and with even greater boldness 
adds, " Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish 
away.'- The wisdom of the ancients, where is it ? It is 
wholly gone. A schoolboy to-day knows more than Sir 
Isaac Newton knew. His knowledge has vanished away. 
You put yesterday's newspaper in the fire. Its knowledge 
has vanished away. You buy the old editions of the 
great encyclopaedias for a few pence. Their knowledge 
has vanished away. Look how the coach has been super- 
seded by the use of steam. Look how electricity has 



58 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

superseded that, and swept a hundred almost new inven- 
tions into oblivion. One of the greatest living authorities, 
Sir William Thompson, said the other day, u The steam- 
engine is passing away." " Whether there be knowledge, 
it shall vanish away." At every workshop you will see, 
in the back yard, a heap of old iron, a few wheels, a few 
levers, a few cranks, broken and eaten with rust. 
Twenty years ago that was the pride of the city. Men 
flocked in from the country to see the great invention; 
now it is superseded, its day is done. And all the boasted 
science and philosophy of this day will soon be old. But 
yesterday, in the University of Edinburgh, the greatest 
figure in the faculty was Sir James Simpson, the discov- 
erer of chloroform. The other day his successor and 
nephew, Professor Simpson, was asked by the librarian 
of the University to go to the library and pick out the 
books on his subject that were no longer needed. And 
his reply to the librarian was this: "Take every text- 
book that is more than ten years old, and put it down in 
the cellar." Sir James Simpson was a great authority 
only a few years ago : men came from all parts of the 
earth to consult him ; and almost the whole teaching of 
that time is consigned by the science of to-day to oblivion. 
And in every branch of science it is the same. " Now we 
know in part. We see through a glass darkly." 

Can you tell me anything that is going to last ? Many 
things Paul did not condescend to name. He did not 
mention money, fortune, fame; but he picked out the 
great things of his time, the things the best men thought 
had something in them, and brushed them peremptorily 
aside. Paul had no charge against these things in them- 



The Greatest Tiring in the World. 59 

selves. All he said about them was that they would not 
last. They were great things, but not supreme things. 
There were things beyond them. What we are stretches 
past what we do, beyond what we possess. Many things 
that men denounce as sins are not sins ; but they are 
temporary. And that is a favorite argument of the New 
Testament. John says of the world, not that it is wrong, 
but simply that) it "passeth away." There is a great 
deal in the world that is delightful and beautiful ; there 
is a great deal in it that is great and engrossing ; but it 
will not last. All that is in the world, the lust of the eye, 
the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, are but for a 
little while, Love not the world therefore. Nothing 
that it contains is worth the life and consecration of an 
immortal soul. The immortal soul must give itself to 
something that is immortal. And the only immortal 
things are these : " Now abideth faith, hope, love, but the 
greatest of these is love." 

Some think the time may come when two of these 
three things will also pass away — faith into sight, hope 
into fruition. Paul does not say so. We know but little 
now about the conditions of the life that is to come. But 
what is certain is that Love must last. God, the Eternal 
God, is Love. Covet therefore that everlasting gift, that 
one thing which it is certain is going to stand, that one 
coinage which will be current in the Universe when all 
the other coinages of all the nations of the world shall be 
useless and unhonored. You will give yourselves to 
many things, give yourselves first to Love. Hold things 
in their proportion. Hold things in their proportion. 
Let at least the first great object of our lives be to achieve 



60 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

the character defended in these words, the character — 
and it is the character of Christ— which is built round 
Love. 

I have said this thing is eternal. Did you ever notice 
how continually John associates love and faith with 
eternal life ? I was not told when I was a boy that " God 
so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth in Him should have everlasting 
life." What I was told, I remember, was, that God so 
loved the world that, if I trusted in Him, I was to have a 
thing called peace, or I was to have rest, or I was to have 
joy, or I was to have safety. But I had to find out for 
myself that whosoever trusteth in Him— that is, whoso- 
ever loveth Him, for trust is only the avenue to Love — 
hath everlasting life. The Gospel offers a man life. 
Never offer men a thimbleful of Gospel. Do not offer 
them merely joy, or merely peace, or merely rest, or 
merely safety ; tell them how Christ came to give men a 
more abundant life than they have, a life abundant in 
love, and therefore abundant in salvation for themselves, 
and large in enterprise for the alleviation and redemption 
of the world. Then only can the Gospel take hold of the 
whole of a man, body, soul, and spirit, and give to each 
part of his nature its exercise and reward. Many of the 
current Gospels are addressed only to a part of man's 
nature. They offer peace, not life ; faith, not Love ; jus- 
tification, not regeneration. And men slip back again 
from such religion because it has never really held them. 
Their nature was not all in it. It offered no deeper and 
gladder life-current than the life that was lived before. 



The Greatest Tiling in the World. 61 

Surely it stands to reason that only a fuller love can 
compete with the love of the world. 

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love 
for ever is to live for ever. Hence, etbrnal life is inex- 
tricably bound up with love. We want to live for ever 
for the same reason that we want to live to-morrow. 
Why do you want to live to-morrow ? It is because 
there is some one who loves you, and whom you want to 
see to-morrow, and be with, and love back. There is no 
other reason why we should live on than that we love 
and are beloved. It is when a man has no one to love 
him that he commits suicide. So long as he has friends, 
those who love him and whom he loves, he will live; be- 
cause to live is to love. Be it but the love of a dog, it will 
keep him in life; but let that go and he has no contact 
with life, no reason to live. He dies by his own hand. 
Eternal life also is to know God, and God is love. This 
is Christ's own definition. Ponder it. " This is life 
eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, 
and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." Love must be 
eternal. It is what God is. On the last analysis, then, 
love is life. Love never faileth, and life never faileth, so 
long as there is love. That is the philosophy of what 
Paul is showing us; the reason why in the nature of 
things Love should be the supreme thing — because it is 
going to last; because in the nature of things it is an 
Eternal Life. It is a thing that we are living now, not 
that we get when we die; that we shall have a poor 
chance of getting when we die unless we are living now. 
No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live 
and grow old alone, unloving, and unloved. To be lost 



62 The Greatest Thing in the World. 

is to live in an unregenerate condition, loveless and un- 
loved; and to be saved is to love; and he that dwelleth 
in love dwelleth already in God. For God is love. 

Now I have all but finished. How many of you will 
join me in reading this chapter once a week for the next 
three months ? A man did that once and it changed his 
whole life. Will you do it ? It is for the greatest thing 
in the world. You might begin by reading it every day, 
especially the verses which describe the perfect character. 
"Love suffereth long and is kind; love envieth not; love 
vaunteth not itself." Get these ingredients into your 
life. Then everything that you do is eternal. It is 
worth doing. It is worth giving time to. No man can 
become a saint in his sleep ; and to fulfil the condition re- 
quired demands a certain amount of prayer and medita- 
tion and time, just as improvement in any direction, 
bodily or mental, requires preparation and care. Address 
yourselves to that one thing; at any cost have this tran- 
scendent character exchanged for yours. You will find 
as you look back upon your life that the moments that 
stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are 
the moments when you have done things in a spirit of 
love. As memory scans the past, above and beyond all 
the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those 
supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unno- 
ticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too 
trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered 
into your eternal life. I have seen almost all the beauti- 
ful things God has made; I have enjoyed almost every 
pleasure that He has planned for man ; and yet as I look 
back I see standing out above all the life that has gone 



The Greatest Thing in the World 6$ 

four or five short experiences when the love of God 
reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of 
love of mine, and these seem to be the things which alone 
of all one's life abide. Everything else in all our lives is 
transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts 
of love which no man knows about, or can ever know 
about— they never fail. 

In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgment Day is 
depicted for us in the imagery of One seated upon a 
throne and dividing the sheep from the goats, the test of 
a man then is not, u How have I believed ?" but "How 
have I loved ?" The test of religion, the final test of re- 
ligion, is not religiousness, but Love. I say the final test 
of religion at that great Day is not religiousness, but 
Love; not what I have done, not what I have believed, 
not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the 
common charities of life. Sins of commission in that 
awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we 
have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It 
could not be otherwise. For the withholding of love is 
the negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof that we 
never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means 
that he suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He 
inspired nothing in all our lives, that we were not once 
near enough to Him to be seized with the spell of His 
compassion for the world. It means that— 

" I lived for myself, I thought for myself, 
For myself, and none beside — 
Just as if Jesus had never lived, 
As if He had never died," 



A 



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64 The Greatesc Thing in the World. 



It is the Son of Man before whom the nations of the 
world shall be gathered. It is in the presence of Humanity 
that we shall be charged. And the spectacle itself, the 
mere sight of it, will silently judge each one. Those will 
be there whom we have met and helped; or there, the 
unpitied multitude whom we neglected or despised. No 
other Witness need be summoned. No other charge than 
lovelessness shall be preferred. Be not deceived. The 
words which all of us shall one Day hear sound not of 
theology but of life, not of churches and saints but of the 
hungry and the poor, not of creeds and doctrines but of 
shelter and clothing, not of Bibles and prayer-books but 
of cups of cold water in the name of Christ. Thank God 
the Christianity of to-day is coming nearer the world's 
need. Live to help that on. Thank God men know 
better, by a hair's breadth, what religion is, what God is, 
who Christ is, where Christ is. Who is Christ ? He who 
fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick. 
And where is Christ ? Where ?— Whoso shall receive a 
little child in My name receiveth Me. And who are 
Christ's ? Every one that loveth is born of God. 



THE END. 



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